ReadyBoost for rendering

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I’m curious to know if anyone has experience using Windows “Readyboost” feature for rendering.

Readyboost allows you to use external memory sources as RAM, such as flash drives and external hard drives.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/readyboost.aspx

I tried it out with a 4GB flash drive, and my render time decreased by 10 seconds. With this in mind, would it be worth to purchase something like a 50GB external hard drive to use for rendering, and is that really the equivalent of having 50GBs of actual RAM?

2

Ram is fast while external hard drives aren’t.

3

I think you misunderstand the purpose of readyboost. It has nothing to do with RAM, it’s merely a faster cache for your harddrive. (So using an external harddrive as a cache to a harddrive doesn’t make sense)

How much RAM did your computer use while rendering? It might be that the only reason for the increase in speed is because the pagefile (which I didn’t know readyboost did aswell) was put onto the flashdrive. So all the random reads and writes to the pagefile was faster the the flashdrive.

Readyboost only helps when something has to be read from the Harddrive, since Harddrive is fastest with sequential reads and slowest with random reads while Flash is fast with random reads but relatively slow with sequential reads.
Best option is to buy more ram. Second best option is to buy a faster harddrive (the new $100 SSD would be best)

To sum it up, the speed increase you got seems to simply be a fluke.
HDD’s as a cache to an HDD, not sensible.
Readyboost, to speed up application loading times, that’s it. Aswell as the pagefile.
More ram is the best when you want more ram :eek:

4

Also, is that 10 seconds on average or did you only render one frame without readyboost and then the same frame with readyboost? There is a difference :slight_smile:

5

i think on vista readyboost for USB key

is limited to something like 2 GB or 4GB

it wont’ go above that ?
unless there is new soft for window 7 ?

and i did test that before i got 4 GB of ram and it did help a little
but you need very large file before getting to 3 GB of memory

and in any case on 32 bits i think blender itself is limited to around 4 GB!
unless your on 64 bits PC!

salutations

6

Thanks for the responses.
I did only do the test once, but I was intrigued by the idea and thought it was worth asking about.

For curiosity’s sake, what kind of results would I get if I were to dedicate the maximum amount of space allowed for Readyboost, 256GBs?

7

sorry as i can remermber it cannot go to 250 GB
on vista only limited to 4 GB and again using only 3 GB

look at the microsoft page and read it and check on your help file
i doubt it can go to 250 GB

anyway there are no USB key yet at over 32 GB ?

and using external disk drive it not worth the speed is too slow usually !

salutations

8

I think that may be the case with Vista, but with Windows 7 it goes higher:

ReadyBoost, which also comes with Vista, uses a USB flash drive or card as memory and it works with most of the flash storage devices.
In Windows 7, it can handle more flash memory and even multiple devices up to eight, for a maximum 256GB of additional memory

9

window 7 is another beast!

and don’t forget that on the USB key there is only a portion of it at high speed
so it won’t use all of the memory on the card
so still doubt that you can go at high speed memory with 256 GB
at least not yet on a PC.
but it may come in a few years who knows!

in any case you would still need a super fast pc to deal with so much memory in
a short time

good luck and happy 2.5

10

HDD or slow flash drives won’t work at all with Readyboost. Windows will automatically detect that the drive is to slow and won’t enable you to turn on ReadyBoost for that drive. So a cheap 32GB Flash drive might end up being worthlesss, I fast 4 or 8GB Flash Drive is best for Readyboost (Or a really expensive fast 16GB/32GB Flash drive).

Your best bet is to get more ram, can I get your system specs and give you recommendations on upgrading what will give you the best performance improvement?

11

All it does is use an SSD for swapping out your memory rather than your primary hard drive.

If your memory is getting swapped out to the disk, you need more memory, not this gimmick.

12

with Big simulations (Fluid sim, smoke sim) it would help you a tiny bit.

But yeah, more memory.

13

On GNU/Linux the mtdblock module lest your use videoram which give better results as it’s generally faster than your system ram.

14

Actually, no. It’s only usefull if you got a lot of small files that need to be accessed very often since it’s using the small seek times of flash memory for that effect. With the big files of the smoke sim for example you might end up even slower.

In short: Readyboos nearly never is of any use and might slow down your system. Invest in more and faster RAM or a solid state drive (SSD) for better performance.